School gives you information, starting your own business requires skills and knowledge your not taught in school. I dont have an MBA but I have started my own company. Mechanixloop.com is my first start up, however I do plan on one day getting an MBA because of my belief in continuing your education.

I think if you are serious about business you should get an MBA if it will teach you things you can not learn in the work place. I think if you are wanting to chart new waters in a new industry an MBA wont teach you things you need to know. Just get some good mentors and jump in and you’ll learn what you need to know when you need to know it and have a product in the process.

Myself, I did an MBA while running a small, entrepreneurial business. I found the MBA helped a lot for the reasons you’ve mentioned. However, the most important aspect was the discussions of failures and people’s experiences.

One example was my excellent sales prof. His stories and answers to questions were just better than reading 10 sales books. He could vary the material he presented to our needs and interests. Furthermore, all 30 of us in the class were tuned in to the same case studies and material. That always led to interesting conversations and observations that chould not be covered in a textbook.

If one had an “Entrepreneurial Reading Group” that could really take place of the MBA. But reading solo is just not as effective. I’ve looked at the Portable MBA site, and that comes close to what the MBA did give me, but frankly, reason #1: commitment was the winner for me. Signing up for a course while working in a business pinned me down to do at least 20 hours of work a week on the learning. Without the coursework structure, I just wouldn’t have been able to find (make?) that much time.

Do you need an MBA to run a startup? Of course not, but it does help tremendously.

If you are technical with no business sense find people when can strengthen your weakness.

What I really learned as I studied for my MBA was how to resarch the right solution to a problem. Sure I can probably recall more about economic theory than I care to but in the end I didn’t *really learn* about international trade and import/export regulations until I started working at a mequila.

Do you need an MBA? No, you just need to recognize where you are weak and be willing to ask for help.

1) Do we need an MBA degree to operate a startup?

I think one can learn almost everything by reading books or thru the Internet, especially those with no experiments required. I read about someone operating a non-profit vet hospital for wildlife animals… who learned the veterinary knowledge on his own! So this doens’t seem to be a specific question on MBA. I bet that guy doesn’t have an MBA degree to learn how to operate that vet hospital too.

From time to time I heard about people saying one can learn by reading and practicing (not just startup)… especially went into debates on certain courses are good or valuable…. I believe the question of “certain courses needed for doing something” is a wrong question. Professions like lawyers, doctors all require practices before they can be accredited. Courses themselves never seem to be a sufficient condition for doing something successfully.

Looking at fish-ball stand owners, they probably don’t have MBA degree. But they know pretty well about raw material, i.e. fish-ball, supply, how to attract customers…..

Fish-ball stand owners probably don’t need undergraduate degree too, so why MBA?

2) What’s an MBA useful for? Why not replaced by reading books?

I did my MBA with much time spent on books and course materials. But then, there are still more to provide in an MBA programme:

a) Commitment, I have to say some people are more committed when they took classes. I also understand that this is not a good reason

b) Assessment, assessment of your knowledge to certain level, and not mis-interpreting the subject matter.

c) Fixed Curriculum, you can always read what you like to read. But now you are forced to read something useful while you might not like it

d) Discussion, you have chances to discuss with people of similar interests, not to mention the teacher who give guidance when you are struck with something

e) Projects, games, and visits, I think this is something that differentiate an MBA programme with other postgraduate business programmes. The school I studied offered an intensive entrepreneurial project. Although it is something far from actually starting a startup, I believe this is also the closest one can get without putting big amount of money, time, and idea. The teacher also have good experiences with startup too.

Although an MBA degree never seem to be sufficient or even necessary condition to run a startup, I do believe an MBA provides a better understanding on what business is, and maybe better what running a startup is from a b-school focused on entrepreneurship.

3) Is it better to be a “business guy” or a “technical guy” as a founder?

What I heard most is that a “technical guy” shouldn’t be a founder. I met quite some good hackers but don’t seem good at knowing the market. Hackers are hard to find. It takes talent and years of learning to be a good hacker. But if they are able to turn their mindset to be more market-oriented, it makes a very good entrepreneur.

From the entrepreneurial project, one interesting thing is that ideas all come from their technology transfer company. Despite the B-school provides good training on entrepreneurship, one still needs good ideas to succeed. And MBA has never meant to replace this. This makes one big misunderstanding from many people criticising the value of MBA education.

I agree with you that MBA isn’t required to startup a new business, and as you rightly point out, what matters at the start is a single amazing concept and executing on it - not over analysis or too much management theory or planning. Once the initial concept is there no doubt the business skills become useful in expansion.

In my case, as a first time entrepreneur starting up a company there were many times where material learnt in business school or MBA would have come in handy - during fund raising especially (convertible debt and valuations are topics tought in my electrical engineering degree).

However in the age of Amazon, Wikis, forums and the net in general, you can always find lots of useful reference material and teach yourself, and much of the material can be summarised and learnt pretty quickly. And the key is - learning and using the knowledge when you need it, rather than learning a whole lot of things, most of which may have either forgotten or are not relevant to you later once you’re starting the business. Once the business starts scaling and money is available then people with those skills can be brought in, but at the start I think not as important.

As for the business vs technical founder, I think you need one of the founders to be technical and able to turn idea into reality. In my case, my founding partner and CTO provided the hardcore coding and 3D skills, and we wouldn’t have got to where we are now unless we started with that foundation - it would just be in idea. And although I don’t code my technical background (at least at a high level) helps me understand the issues and limitations when designing features…

But at the end of the day, I think the burning desire to build something and make it a reality is the most important personal attribute, no matter the background!

“It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need a college. He can learn them from books. The value of an education is a liberal arts college is not learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.” — Albert Einstein

Someone can also argue that an MBA does the same thing on training the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks. So if an MBA has little value in starting up a successful company (which I think in reality, we’ve seen both successful examples and unsuccessful examples of MBAs, so it’s hard to generalize), then probably a university education won’t contribute much either (because both are similar in the way that they train your mind to think, not the learning of many facts). And yes, there are real examples of people who are doing great in starting up great companies without a university degree: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell or the recent phenomenal young dude: Mark Zuckerberg (at least until this day still haven’t completed his degree).

But I don’t think that many people would agree that if you want to start a successful company, then you should do it without attending university, it saves 3 or 4 years of your time and money (and technically, you can, if you really want, it’s actually quite easy to do and it seems that all the elements of building a successful company don’t have a direct relationship with a university education, so it should be safe to omit it). Why prejudice on MBAs? MBA can’t make someone a successful entrepreneur, there is no doubt about it; but nor can a college degree or engineering backgroud or any other education. But like a college degree or engineering background, MBA does no harm if you want to start up a company or even a successful one. (But I guess probably the truth is, as described in your post. To many people, the purpose of an MBA is either to climb a corporate ladder or to extend your networks. But still, it doesn’t conflict with starting up a company and being an entrepreneur. And I believe that to many people, a college degree or engineering background is either to have a higher paid job than those who don’t have a college degree or to climb a corporate ladder, although nowadays, more people choose to do Masters in the hope that it may help them climb the ladder faster. But still, it doesn’t conflict with starting up a company and being an entrepreneur.)

As I look back on my own past, I have to admit that I have forgotten most of the stuff I have learned while I was studying at the university and for all the things I know today (such as writing programs), I could have done it without doing a computer science program. Self-study is probably enough. But I don’t feel that I have wasted my time attending college (so, Einstein’s quote actually does make some sense to me) because I think the experience alone is worth it. MBA isn’t that much different, I think some people do have similar feelings, especially those who have done it, the experience alone is worth it. Life is a journey, not a destination. So whether MBA is good or not so good to starting your own company is totally upto your interpretation, no single point of view is the only correct interpretation.

I think entrepreneurship or business (or any other form of behavior of human society) is too broad a topic to reach a certain set of views. People are different (and I am biased to believe that some people are born to be more gifted in certain areas, including entrepreneurship and business, than other people), something is achievable for a certain group of people, but for others, it’s impossible. Even you tell them exactly the steps on how to do it, they just won’t get it, regardless how hard they try. So even the best advice won’t help everyone. For those to whom the advice applies, they tend to agree with it; others tend to disagree with it. What I am trying to say here is that for some of the advice given by those successful people on entrepreneurship or business (mentioned in this post or elsewhere), it probably won’t work for everyone. If you are not the “right” person or don’t have the “stuff” to excute and you are trying to follow or mimic what they have said, you will likely fail (but in this case, you will fail anyway with or without those advice). Despite the fact that those advice are invaluable to some other people.

Finally, I’d like to provide another example to illustrate my understanding that you should not always try to follow or mimic what some successful people have done because you are you, not them (and thus we still need to have computer science programs offered at universities and you should take them if you want to be a hacker):
Stiff asks, great programmers answer